7 Genius Ways to Hack Your Drugstore Makeup

1) Many inexpensive products (like mascara and eyeliner) work just as well as—and sometimes better than—high-end makeup.
2) You can use drugstore makeup to boost the effect of high-end makeup.
3) Certain tricks can make your drugstore products look and work better.

Were you not aware of that last fact? That’s OK, neither were we. Until we discovered an amazing Reddit thread with people extolling their best drugstore-makeup hacks.

Melt your concealer and add primer to it to make it go on creamier. One poster lamented that her Wet n’ Wild CoverAll Liquid Concealer didn’t go on as easily as she wanted, so she melted the product in a glass bowl in the microwave, added a small pump of her primer to the liquid, and poured it into a pan to dry. “Let me tell you, this was the best thing ever! Now, it’s creamy as hell and blends with a sponge so much better,” she writes.

Quickly change the state of hard-to-use powdery eye shadows. “I re-press powdery eye shadows by mixing in a tiny amount of silicone-based primer,” writes another user. “They turn out very nice and smooth.” You’ll need to know how to re-press makeup to do this trick: Here’s a lesson.